Tag Archives: Black holes

I decided, somewhat insanely, to get Leo a subscription to Science magazine, the lead publication of the AAAS, and one of the two top international scientific periodicals (the other being Nature). My concept here was that we might find at least one interesting science thing to talk about each week, and the pictures in Science are way cool!

(I had gotten him a subscription to Scientific American a while back, but, to be honest, the articles are too long and too wordy, and frankly dumbed-down and pretty boring, so Leo really never got into them. I think what’s going on, in part, is that the graphics/word count is too low in SciAm, whereas in Science it’s way higher, so Science is more like a graphic novel than SciAm.)

The first issue arrived this week, and it turned out that there’s a very high density of articles that were quite interesting, both graphically and in terms of content. Leo was especially interested in this one:

I can hear you yawning, even over the internet!

But wait! I turns out that this is a really cool paper about making very interesting nan0-alloys by combining a bunch of different molecules. It has great graphics, for example:

Notice the interesting seemingly-3-Dimensional egg-like thing in the middle of the picture. The reason that it seems 3D is that is is 3D! We got hold of some PlayDough and made a bunch of model of the various nano-alloys depicted in the paper. Here’s another:

I’m not actually sure which one this was supposed to be…possibly the AuCuCo that it’s sitting on top of.

Anyway, this devolved…or perhaps I should say “evolved” into our creating a complete Clay Science Museum!

Here’s the whole museum:

In the center we have the anatomically correct insides of a person. Here’s a close up:

It’s a male, in case it isn’t obvious; I’ll spare you the details! 🙂

This is a ciliate protozoa that we saw in the microscope the other day from a sample of pond water:

One of the really nice things about this program was that in addition to the usual 2D rendition of gravity warping space(-time), they had a really nice animation of the warping of space(-time) in 3-dimensions, which was something like this:

This morning on the drive to school, Leo decided that he wanted to write in the air so that he could write a message and it would stay there. He had in mind that when the car drove through it, it would come into the car and we would go right through the message, and it would come out the back … or something. I should have thought of sky writing, although I didn’t at the time. Nonetheless, we talked about the possibility of coloring the air molecules – but then the message would move with air currents. We talked about laser projection – but that would need to project onto fog, or something. (This is the obvious place that I should have thought of sky writing!) My last suggestion was thousands of nano-drones that we could program to for a pattern and stay in geocentric place, like the GPS satellites – but then we would disturb them as we drove through. (We retrospectively figured out that this idea probably came from the micro-bots from Big Hero 6, but I had in more in mind Neal Stephenson’s “Toner Wars”.)

A few moments after the conversation died down Leo said (I’m only slightly paraphrasing): “I wish I had a black hole pen that could write on space time. I’ll bet that that would stay in place, except for gravitational warping.”

I mentioned in another post that Leo is obsessed with Where’s my Water. Yesterday we were exploring gravitational lensing, and Leo turned it into a “where’s my laser” game. I don’t think I need to explain this any further; the pics are pretty self-explanatory (except that the thing in the middle is a black hole — but maybe that’s obvious).

Leo asked me whether entanglement information survives/escapes a black hole. Specifically, he asked me (in only slight paraphrase) whether if one of the particles (headed in different directions) fall into black holes on either end, does the other one know it?

Later on he asked me whether, since time dilation increases as you get closer and closer to the speed of light, whether photons, which are actually AT the speed of light, see any time change at all? (Put another way: Is proper time for a photon unchanging?)